Large-scale business software applications are sometimes categorized in terms of a “front end component” that includes a graphical user interface (GUI) to present data to users and accept data entry from users. Such front-end components are customized for specific customers. Another component of such software applications is sometimes referred to as a “back end component” that stores business data and processes the business data according to business logic. The back end component retrieves, generates, and maintains the business data. The back end component is usually responsible for the consistency and correctness of the data. The back end component also can store relationships between the various data. In a typical business software application, the front-end component includes application code to display, aggregate, and enable modification of data of the back end.
For large-scale business applications, it is sometimes difficult to coordinate software development of the front end and back end components. Meta data, in a repository, has been used to model standard operations on data collections in the back end. This meta data can be used to develop front-end components.
The front-end application code can provide help to users for generating requests to the back end for data retrieval operations. One essential feature for a user interface is adequate help values for entry fields. This help may include pull down windows with choices for a user to select from. In many state-of-the-art applications these help values are presented as list boxes or combo boxes with values retrieved from a static list. Thus, the help values are fixed for the lifetime of the application.